This ingenious piece of apostolic romance is due to the same veracious Metaphrastes, above quoted. I have derived it from him through Caesar Baronius, who gives it in his Annales Ecclesiastici. (44, § 10, 11.) The great annalist approves and adopts it, however, only as far as it describes the journey of Peter to Antioch; and there he leaves the narrative of Metaphrastes, and instead of taking Peter on his long tour through Asia Minor and back to Jerusalem, as just described, carries him off upon a far different route, achieving the great journey westward, which accords with the view taken by the vast majority of the old ecclesiastical writers, and which is next given here. Metaphrastes also maintains this view, indeed, but supposes and invents all the events just narrated, as intermediate occurrences, between Peter’s escape and his great journey, and begins the account of this latter, after his return from his Asian circuit. To connect all this long pilgrimage with the story given in the sacred record, the sage Baronius makes the ingenious suggestion, that this was the occult reason why Agrippa was wroth with those of Tyre and Sidon; namely, that Peter had gone through their country when a fugitive from the royal vengeance, and had been favorably received by the Tyrians and Sidonians, who should have seized him as a runaway from justice, and sent him back to Agrippa. This acute guess, he thinks, will show a reason also for the otherwise unaccountable fact, that Luke should mention this quarrel between Agrippa and those cities, in connection with the events of Peter’s escape and Agrippa’s death. For the great cardinal does not seem to appreciate the circumstance of its close relation to the latter event, in presenting the occasion of the reconciliation between the king and the offending cities, on which the king made his speech to the people, and received the impious tribute of praise, which was followed by his death;――the whole constituting a relation sufficiently close between the two events, to justify the connection in Luke. THE FIRST VISIT TO ROME.